June 29, 2026

Photo credit: Spencer Platt / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Last week, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board approved Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s zero-percent increase on rent-stabilized apartments. Intended to address affordability, the freeze will in fact impose extreme consequences, Arpit Gupta writes.

We’ve already seen these effects play out in other cities. Extending rent control in San Francisco, for instance, cut the rental housing supply by 15 percent. The lost supply pushed market rents higher, while tenant mobility declined.

Rent freezes reduce the incentive to invest in a building because tenants have little incentive to leave. “The lesson is that freezing the price of a service indefinitely while its costs continue to rise does not produce cheap or abundant service,” Gupta writes. “Instead, it produces deteriorating assets and, eventually, public bailouts and takeovers.”

Read more about the potential ramifications.

New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board has approved the rent freeze Mayor Mamdani campaigned on last year, but as Christian Browne writes, the mayor’s seeming triumph “may set the stage for the defeat of his most famous policy.”

The power to set rents in regulated apartments belongs not to the mayor but to the Rent Guidelines Board—an independent body that, by law, must make its determinations according to objective evidentiary factors. Failure to follow these procedures sets the stage for future legal challenges. Landlords need only show that the board’s decision was tainted by political bias.

And now the burden of proof for showing bias may have lightened significantly. Just hours before the rent-freeze vote, RGB member Christina Smyth resigned, alleging that the board’s determination “was decided last year on the campaign trail.”

Read more here.

The Supreme Court delivered a significant victory for federal regulatory authority in Monsanto v. Durnell, ruling 7–2 that federal law bars state failure-to-warn lawsuits over Roundup’s labeling. The majority held that because the EPA approved Roundup’s label and federal law prohibits states from imposing different labeling requirements, Missouri could not require Monsanto to add a cancer warning.

Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow James R. Copland outlines how the decision reinforces scientific and regulatory consistency. Though the ruling will not end all Roundup litigation, it limits a major category of lawsuits and may curb similar mass tort claims.

“Under standard principles of American product liability law, if a manufacturer discloses that a product it sells generates a risk of injury, a purchaser can’t later claim damages for an injury caused by that disclosed risk,” Copland writes.

Read more here.

The “21st Century Road to Housing Act” has officially passed both houses of Congress. Intended to ameliorate high housing costs, the bill “prohibits large institutional investors from purchasing certain single-family homes to promote homeownership opportunities for American families, not corporations.”

Eric Kober calls this provision “a make-believe solution,” given “homeowner subsidies are considered politically untouchable.”

Other parts of the bill make more sense, he writes, like eliminating the federal requirement that manufactured homes have a permanent chassis. “The chassis allows the home to be transported,” he explains, “but in many cases manufactured homes are placed on a permanent foundation and are not intended to be moved again. Elimination of the chassis saves $5,000–10,000 in construction costs.”

Read more about the legislation.

Harvey C. Mansfield joined Harvard’s faculty in 1962. Recently retired, he spent much of his time there sounding the alarm about many of the university’s policies.

In his new book, Where Harvard Went Wrong, Mansfield recounts many of his writings and speeches—all of which “fell on deaf ears.” He argues that conservative ideas deserve a more hospitable place in American universities.

“A recurring feature of his work is an insistence on describing realities that some prefer to soften or ignore,” John McMillian writes. “Two of his longest-standing concerns have been affirmative action and grade inflation, both of which, he argues, rest on ‘the dubious morality of telling people they are something you wish they were but know they are not.’”

Read McMillian’s review.